hey my dear teacher! SOS!!!!!
I am in China and using VPN to watch your videos, I really enjoy what u have done! But the connection is really bad, sometimes I need to pause the video and wait for loading. Do u know any method that I can use to improve the connection?

ZHOU YI - 7 months ago

by the way, the connection is pretty good when I watch youtube videos!

Hey there, in this video we're going to create a document of a specific size, in this case it's going to be a postcard but you can do the same thing for US Letter, or A4, A3. It's a great way of getting started on a specific size ready to go for your project. All right, let's learn how to do that now in Photoshop.

To get started what we're going to do is, we're going to create a new page and bring our image into it. I find that's so much easier. It doesn't matter whether you're new or advanced. It's just easier to do it that way rather than let's say opening up the image and then going to image, and going to camera size, then kind of cropping it down, and which way does it crop in. That's a way of doing it, but I'll show you the sneaky way, it's a little bit easy.

To get started what we're going to do is go to 'File', and we're going to go to 'New'. I find it's better to create a document the right size and then drag our content into it. Now in this new document window you can totally start typing sizes and resolution. You can change it from inches, to pixels, to millimeters. At the top here are some handy presets. So I can go to 'Photo', and I've got my kind of traditional photograph ratios. I've got print, there's my US and A4 sizes. Now just know that there's this little thing that says 'View More'. All sorts of stuff all tucked in there. 'Art & Illustration', 'Web'.

The one we want, we want a postcard, and this is hidden under 'Art & Illustration', you can see him there. Click on him. Now just so you know as well, this is the US size for postcards. Postcards turns out weirdly, as I've moved around the world, aren't the same size, like business cards, they're all different in different parts of the world, which is weird but anyway 4" x 6", I want mine to be Landscape. Just leave everything here matching mine. The resolution the same, and the color mode. We'll talk about those a little later in the course, they're boring. Not boring, but we'll do them a little bit later.

So if yours looks like mine, let's click 'Create'. So this is my postcard. First of the thing we want to do is we go to 'File' and try to save it. Weirdly in Photoshop, there's one of those little weird things where it won't let you save it. Basically it's saying, like you haven't done anything. Nothing worthy of saving at least, I don't know why. So you can either do something, like grab the Type Tool and start typing, or just go to 'File', 'Save As', you end up at the same place.

So what we're going to do is - I'm going to put mine on my Desktop. I'm going to call mine 'Allstar Postcard'. Now at the end here, I like the V system, V1, V2, V3. Never call it Draft or Final. Final is like the kiss of death. You call it Final, you'll be calling it Final2. Some of you are laughing, because that's what we do. I do it too. V1, V2 works for me, and I'm going to click 'Save'. Next thing I want to do is bring in my Gradient kind of background thing. So I'm going to open up the file I was working with earlier. So, say you are following along with this course you might have a file saved somewhere neatly that's got this Gradient that we worked on in the last video.

If you don't, you can go to 'File', 'Open' and open up, under 'Exercise Files', under '03 Shapes' there's one called 'Gradient Image', just to save you in case you forgot to save it. I'm using this original one, it's got text and stuff on here. What I want to do is-- I'm going to click on the word 'Shoes', whatever that layer is, and I grab my 'Move Tool', click, hold, and drag. I'm going to move it, hold, hold… Holding, holding… and drag it down here.

Why I find this easier is, can you see, it's actually not the right size. I find it just easier to do this, and maybe transform it. So with it selected, 'Edit', 'Transform', 'Scale'. And I can see, it's just a little too big, I can hold down 'Shift'. Still the wrong proportion so I'm going to click on over there, holding 'Shift' in the corners and get it to the right size.

All right friends, that is how to create a document. Doesn't really matter what you're doing. We did just a postcard, but you can do anything and I find it easier to, like bring everything you need into it, and resize it to what you need, knowing that it is ready to go. All right, let's get into the next video.